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Saturday, December 6, 2014

As a part of my on-going commitment to provide information about the latest global developments pertaining to the future of the Internet, today article is another one from a global perspective. As Netizens please do stay aware to efforts which can dramaticaly effect your capabilities on the Internet, no matter your country or demographic!
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New Social Contract for The
Internet From
Thehuffingtonpost.com

Posted: 12/05/2014 2:50 pm EST Updated:
12/05/2014 3:01 pm EST

We have reason to rejoice these days. Ever since the
world became aware of U.S. policy to surveil Internet users en masse, the
ground has shifted under the idea of 'Internet Governance.' This term, if not
yet extinct, is at least already outdated.

For many people, 'Internet Governance' was little more
than an empty buzzword. Few will mourn its passing. Those who benefit from
imbalances of power over the Internet might think this is good news; the end of
'Internet Governance' could remove obstacles to complete domination. But, for
them, I think this news will be especially unwelcome. As the concept of
'Internet Governance' loses value, 'Internet Public Policy' rises alongside it.
Here's what the change looks like.

During the recent Geneva Internet Platform conference, I
met Bob Kahn, one of the authors of TCP/IP. TCP/IP is one of many protocols
defining how computers, servers and networks route data. By far the dominant
protocol, TCP/IP gave the Internet its 'interconnecticity' (another buzzword,
borne of 'interconnectivity' and 'velocity'), and the impression of the web as
a discrete and fluid space. Kahn, in one of his many visits to Geneva, had just
presented his latest 'baby,' the Digital Object Naming Association, a tool for
assigning a unique global number to every object in the Internet. Kahn's new
prima DONA, as he put it,
resembles the early IANA under Jon Postel. "Very early on, Jon was
corresponding with me about the naming and numbering system established for the
Internet (IANA). He would receive calls from all over. Once, the chief of staff
for the King of Jordan asked why a student was handling domains from his
classroom at Amman University. We replied that we had no religious stance, and
they let him keep the job."

But why has DONA chosen a Swiss home address instead of
joining ICANN, IANA's host, in sunny southern California? Kahn shared his
thoughts: "IANA and DONA are similar, but as we talked to different
governments about global numbering, the Chinese and others said, 'if this
system is set up as a U.S. non-profit under U.S. jurisdiction and control, we
won't use it.' This is why we opted for a Swiss foundation." I asked him
why IANA wasn't a Swiss foundation from the start, as Dr. Postel once wished.
Kahn, who had differed from Postel on this point, gave a simple answer:
"The last thing you wanted was regulation, but things have changed."

If DONA is incorporated in Switzerland, the question
remains: How much control will the U.S. try to exert? Governance of DONA
will be a matter of global public policy; oversight can't be unilateral. Even
Kahn's personal patent to "protect this new object numbering process"
will come under scrutiny, especially if the International Organization for
Standardization (ISO) gets involved in Kahn's numbering system.

In a twist of historical irony, Louis Pouzin,
another Internet Hall-of-Famer, was in the audience when Kahn presented DONA.
The French polytechnicien was the first to use datagrams to exchange data
packets in a network. In February 1973, Pouzin presented his work to Kahn and
Vint Cerf, when they were still puzzling over data packet exchanges between
networks (a puzzle they solved with TCP/IP). Unlike Kahn with DONA, all three
researchers were working on public grants (Pouzin for France, Kahn and Cerf for
DARPA), and so none patented his work. The French Wikipedia page says
"Pouzin's work was used greatly by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf to create TCP/IP,"
whereas the U.S. Wikipedia page puts it differently: "His work influenced
Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf and others in the development of TCP/IP protocols used
by the Internet." Cerf is now VP of Google, Kahn still hates regulation
and Pouzin is a computer scientist turned activist competing against ICANN for
more Internet through alternative open routing. It's no surprise that Pouzin
advocates for re-balancing Internet power away from the U.S..

For years, the U.S. exploited unbalanced power to make
'Internet Governance' a diplomatic no-man's land, which it alone policed
through vague processes of self-nomination to a Byzantine nominating committee
to... Formal consensus was always kept at bay, unfavorable issues scuttled and
decisive votes avoided. A not-so-democratic world. But now, a number of
governments have already had their say in the role DONA could play in the
Internet. Such a shaping of the tech landscape is a sign of this shift away
from 'Internet Governance' to public geo-politics and geo-economics.

The NetMundial Initiative, announced last summer as a
joint venture by ICANN and the World Economic Forum, involves WEF's 750
transnational corporate members, who bring countless global leaders and social
activists to Davos, even though some are left out in the snow. This
'initiative' follows the NETMundial 'summit' in Sao Paulo last April. The
summit proved to be a carrot for Brazil, who walked away the diplomatic bon
hôte. But for all of President Rousseff's finger-wagging
at the UN over U.S. surveillance, the U.S. skirted the issue at the Brazil
summit by announcing it could end its IANA oversight, with control shifting,
conditionally, to a "multistakeholder" arrangement, possibly ICANN
itself.

No one expected WEF and ICANN to follow up the summit by
launching the NetMundial Initiative. Some summit participants felt the
NETMundial name was hijacked. Others worried NetMundial would co-opt both the
name and the joint statement made by the conference participants, even though there
is no official listing of the signatories. There are persistent murmurings of
re-writing the NETMundial principles under the NetMundial Initiative, which, sadly,
hasn't mobilized many of the summit participants.

Some participants went further, like the Just Net Coalition, which
strongly refused to join the Initiative. For that matter, the Internet Society
(ISOC) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) also declined to join the NetMundial Initiative.
Just Net Coalition sees the Initiative drawing the corporate elite into a new
power center, a global Internet 'establishment.' ISOC may see the Initiative as
a rival. The Just Net Coalition, an umbrella for civil society organizations
from around the globe, has called on civil society not to join NetMundial. But
many join nonetheless, because "nature abhors a vacuum," "we
will know our enemy better, if we join," or "we will be able to
influence from within."

Wherever one stands, when the WEF calls for
"constructive debate over non-technological issues," the fog begins
to clear. Debates about safe encryption, mass surveillance, interconnection,
searching, aggregating personal profiles, localized data within national
jurisdictions -- many issues once considered dry and technical -- are
transformed to be political. Once WEF's wealthy corporate members become interested
in these issues, heads of state soon follow, and deputy ministers and
undersecretaries of telecommunication will be scrambling to brief the higher
levels of government around the world.

In May 2014, the shift was signaled elsewhere: The
advocate general for the EU's Court of Justice argued that Google shouldn't
honor individuals' "right to be forgotten." No one expected Google to lose.
But the Court's judgment upended the advocate general's case -- aurprise! The
decision was a re-affirmation of political will; it bolstered the European
personal data directive passed three years before Google's launch. Remember, a
directive is a legal and regulatory act by the European Council, Commission and
Parliament, not a "multistakeholder" decision involving corporations,
special experts and whoever else can insinuate themselves into the fray. The
judgment was in favor of a democratic Europe protecting its citizens' rights
and against the supremacy of a transnational corporation.

The European Parliament recently called for Google to break up. This action was supported by a large majority of
MPs. The Internet is truly back in politics. But this doesn't mean the U.S.
will stop derailing whatever contravenes its interests. The last time the
Internet enjoyed so much political attention was in 1995 -- the year the EU
passed the personal data directive -- when Al Gore recognized the value of
controlling the Internet route zone. After three years of lobbying, control was
wrested away from academics and given to a California non-profit by the United
States government. Since then, the U.S. has controlled its contract with ICANN
for the performance of the IANA function.

Now, 15 years of 'Internet Governance' are being dumped
into the dustbin of history, along with the "multistakeholder"
narrative and its foggy concepts like the "equal footing," which
tries to make corporate votes equal to state votes in Internet matters. It is
critical that we recognize these concerns as in the public interest, not allow
them to be only vested interests.

We might also ask whether the repeated calls to protect
freedom of expression for the individual -- a watchword against intervention in
Internet affairs -- is not a ruse for avoiding regulation on the grounds that
the Internet is like life: It all boils down to individual choice. The sum of
individuals' actions does not match the needs of the poor, fragile and
forgotten in society. The Internet can disrupt daily life and the social order
in good ways and bad, but when disruption obscures the democratic social
contract, it is a matter of grave concern.

Stepping in political science, Vint Cerf made a telling
attempt to quote Rousseau in a recent public chat. Google's "Chief
Internet Evangelist" ineptly twisted the philosopher's Du Contrat Social,
a major writing of the Enlightenment, which calls on citizens to abandon part
of their personal sovereignty to a state. In turn, the state protects them and
their right to electoral representation. Cerf read (see 01:30:10) that, "roughly speaking",
Rousseau says: "Citizens give up some of their privacy in exchange for
safety." This must be a different Rousseau, maybe one who works in the
NSA's public relations department. Or perhaps this is just how Rousseau looks
through Google Glass. Whatever the case, it's touching to see a computer
scientist waxing philosophical about social justice, especially when it's the
VP of Google trying to legitimate mass surveillance. Here, too, we see the
Internet courting traditional politics, even if Cerf merely muddles them. Old
power is new power.

In
addition to this blog, I have authored the premiere book on
Netiquette, "Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance
and Add Power to Your Email". You can view my profile, reviews of the
book and content excerpts at: www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo. I am also a
member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and
Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman
Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been
contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ Rider University and PSG of Mercer County New Jersey.

A bot (short
for "robot") is a program that operates as an agent for a user or
another program or simulates a human activity.

bot (short for
"robot") is a program that operates as an agent
for a user or another program or simulates a human activity. On the Internet,
the most ubiquitous bots are the programs, also called spiders or crawlers,
that access Web sites and gather their content for search engine
indexes.

A chatterbot
is a program that can simulate talk with a human being. One of the first and
most famous chatterbots (prior to the Web) was Eliza, a program that pretended
to be a psychotherapist and answered questions with other questions.

Red and Andrette were names of two early programs that
could be customized to answer questions from users seeking service for a
product. Such a program is sometimes called a virtual representative or
a virtual service agent.

A shopbot is a program that shops around the Web
on your behalf and locates the best price for a product you're looking for.
There are also bots such as OpenSesame that observe a user's patterns in navigating
a Web site and customize the site for that user.

A knowbot
is a program that collects knowledge for a user by automatically visiting
Internet sites and gathering information that meets certain specified criteria.

============================================ In
addition to this blog, I have authored the premiere book on
Netiquette, "Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance
and Add Power to Your Email". You can view my profile, reviews of the
book and content excerpts at: www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo. I am also a
member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and
Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman
Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been
contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ Rider University and PSG of Mercer County New Jersey.

Apple has released security updates for Safari to address multiple
vulnerabilities. Exploitation of these vulnerabilities may allow a remote
attacker to cause a denial of service or execute arbitrary code on an affected
system.
Updates include:

VMware has released a security advisory to address multiple vulnerabilities
in vCenter Server, vCenter Server Appliance, and ESXi. Exploitation of these
vulnerabilities may allow a remote attacker to perform man-in-the-middle or
cross-site scripting attacks.
US-CERT encourages users and administrators to review VMware Security
Advisory VSMA-2014-0012
and apply the necessary updates.

============================================ In
addition to this blog, I have authored the premiere book on
Netiquette, "Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance
and Add Power to Your Email". You can view my profile, reviews of the
book and content excerpts at: www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo. I am also a
member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and
Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman
Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been
contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ Rider University and PSG of Mercer County New Jersey.